6 The Golden Age of Piracy, 1714–​1727 The dawn circa 1714 hardly accorded with the recent peace many people trusted would quiet the seas forever. Their hopes were quickly dashed in the “breach of the treaty of Peace and Commerce.” Off on the horizon, warriors plundered the fishery with renewed intensity, abducting mariners, capturing ships, and torching stages. Trade ships also fell prey to the sea raiders who showed no discrimina- tion in their “Seizures made of divers[e] ‌Vessells.” As the victims staggered to re- gain their composure, an imposing man-​of-​war lumbered into view demanding answers from Indians but receiving only bold and plainspoken reminders of the proper order of things in this “their ancient possession,” of ascendancy and ac- quiescence, authority and deference. They declared that they will “no longer suffer any other nation to claim or enjoy usage of these lands,” that “ye Lands are theirs and they can make Warr and peace when they please,” and they did so an- imated by the lessons of recent loss. Elsewhere the self-​proclaimed rulers could be seen collecting duties from fishermen trawling their waters and from “every English trader” anchoring in their harbors.1 A decade later, onlookers would have taken in a wider panorama of vio- lence and new depths of despair. Sea raiders everywhere were hijacking “an in- finite number” of sloops, schooners, and shallops, many of which reappeared as warships “cruizing upon the Banks” to “infest” the fishery, like the “Extraordenar[il]y well fitted” schooner who “Takes all she Can Come up with.” Two of the vessels, converted into blazing infernos and launched with their “sails full,” crept toward a coastal garrison as others shelled the settlers and soldiers who took refuge inside. In every direction colonial crews were made “Prisoners,” captives impressed into service or whisked off to be sold for cash. These were the fortunate ones. Others met the end, their bodies abandoned to the deep as fellow crewmen—​now “Hostages”—​watched from the decks of their new floating prisons. In drifted a boat loaded with frightened vigilantes regretting their decision to set out in pursuit of their stolen property and people. Soon Storm of the Sea: Indians and Empires in the Atlantic’s Age of Sail. Matthew R. Bahar, Oxford University Press (2019). © Matthew R. Bahar. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190874247.003.0007 160 Storm of the Sea after spying an Indian rig on the horizon with its artillery trained on them, the volunteers came unhinged from the unremitting anxiety and quickly turned to flee, “afraid to engage them.”2 The people who watched this dawn would have also heard the familiar sounds of violence. The booming reports of “great guns,” the sharp crackle of “swivel guns,” the dull splintering of masts, the metallic clashing of “Cutlasses,” “Axes,” “knives,” and “hatchets,” the shredding sails, the waves. But most gripping would have been the human sounds, as “very bold” and “incensed” warriors bore down on their prizes with a “severe Command,” in the dictates of others who “Seiz,” “force,” “order,” and “command” their human spoils, in the threats of those who “demand money” as “Tribute” from fishermen and traders. They were bragging again, this time about how they aimed to “joyne more and go and Surprize the Governour and Garrison of Annapolis Royall.”3 The tone of prerogative and impunity taken in at this dawn was a stark contrast to the supplications for help that soon pierced the air. The “distressed people in Marblehead” who could not find a way out of their “Deplorable Surcomstances.” The “terrified” fishermen and their families at Canso who were just assaulted “in the dead of night.” They “suffered very Considerablie.” They were overcome with “cowardice and folly.” They were “so very uneasy” and “very backward.” From the left and right, near and far, the supplications for “emediate meas- ures,” “some speedy and effectual methods,” “all proper Methods,” echoed over the water and faded to silence as their authors waited for some sort of “relief,” anything. The broken remains of the fishing crews were again cowered together ashore, refusing to “go East of this place or scarce to sea.” Their abandonment of the fishery left it totally “impracticable.” Next to them were wives and children and mothers who looked to sea and contemplated the possibility that they will never see their men again and be forced into the growing ranks of “Widdows and fatherless.” No one could muster the nerve to venture out there and face the “Irruptions,” the “Attacks and Barbarities,” the “divers[e] barbarous acts of hos- tility,” the “Great and Many damages.”4 These parallel scenes frame Wabanakia’s longest, most intense, and most pro- ductive campaign of maritime violence to date. The era of ongoing conflict with the English, from the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 through the end of Father Rale’s War in 1727, forms the subject of this chapter. During these years Wabanaki adapted to and then manipulated the borderlands’ new geopolitics dictated by the Treaty of Utrecht by modernizing their diplomatic and military strategy for regional ascendancy. The process of modernization was threefold. In no uncer- tain terms, Indians applied their historic claim to sovereignty over sea and shore to the new postwar world while also amplifying their insistence on the tribu- tary status of English neighbors. As much as Europeans might wish to remap the region, Indians insisted on the right order of things. At the same time, they Golden Age of Piracy 161 detached their seaborne campaigning from wars rooted in the distant power circles of European courts, from conflicts touched off by imperial priorities that increasingly seemed arbitrary and unpredictable. The new face of Wabanaki’s hegemonic ambition was born of a desire to unfetter the political and economic fortunes of Native communities from those of Europe. The Treaty of Utrecht proved to Indians that something needed to change. Its concessions to English interests in the American northeast marked a jarring departure from the continuity and equilibrium maintained by the Treaty of Ryswick after the War of the League of Augsburg fifteen years earlier. At Utrecht, French and English diplomats dealt in Native territory as if they possessed mean- ingful authority over it, carving, trading, and claiming lands and subjects in the name of their kings. France ceded most of Acadia to England, after French aid to local Indians floundered throughout the war. Included in the deal was Port Royal, established over a hundred years earlier by Samuel de Champlain and the revered sagamore Membertou. England claimed it as Annapolis Royal, capital of their new colony, Nova Scotia. The sea change dealt a blow to Wabanaki interests as it undercut a century- long struggle to subjugate English colonialism along the confederacy’s southern frontier. That the setback arose in spite of the devastating achievements won by marine-warriors in the late war only further vexed Native leaders. The Treaty of Utrecht exposed the limitations of their nautical approach to establishing Dawnland dominion.5 What emerged as a revanchist commitment to control the territory of Nova Scotia soon engulfed much of the northeast in a maelstrom of seaborne violence as Indians assaulted English ships and sailors from Newfoundland to the Gulf of Maine. The raiding began on the fishing banks off Nova Scotia within a year of the Utrecht accord, but by the early 1720s warriors to the south were also taking to the sea to counter renewed pressure from New England. Tensions between encroaching colonists and native communities in southern Maine reached a fe- vered pitch when Massachusetts militia forces attacked a noncombatant village in search of its resident Jesuit priest in the spring of 1722, sparking a three- year war between New England and Wabanaki forces over territorial sovereignty and political authority. The outbreak of Father Rale’s War at Norridgewock galvanized Indians throughout the borderlands into a militarized community. Warriors from the Kennebec River in the southwest to Cape Breton Island in the northeast coordinated their naval campaigns to rein in defiant English subjects and reestablish the balance of power. The conflict revealed just how integrated the confederacy had become. The sea raids openly and deliberately defied the Treaty of Utrecht. Indians made clear that they were not beholden to agreements struck by foreign statesmen on the far side of the Atlantic. Nor would they wait idly for the next European war to arrive on their shores. Only they possessed the authority to 162 Storm of the Sea make violence and peace in the land of their ancestors. Henceforth, their quest for dominion over the northeast would be waged on their own terms. Wabanaki hegemony post- Utrecht took on a decidedly pecuniary edge. Throughout the 1710s and 1720s they stormed English ships and demanded monetary gifts, they abducted and commodified English mariners, and they sold their English prizes to French buyers for staggering cash sums. Money offered Indians what their now meager fur supply no longer could: flexibility, stability, and security. Unlike beaver hats in the promenades and salons of Europe, cash in currency- starved North America never went out of style.6 The increasingly high- stakes enterprise of sea raiding privileged native elites who could master the nautical skills and virtues valorized in Wabanaki communities. Headmen responded to the shifting needs of their constituents and the tenuous nature of their own authority by positioning themselves and their offspring at the cutting edge of economic change. On the contested waters of the northwest Atlantic able seamanship and naval prowess provided the surest route to a community’s material and social stability and, as a result, to the pres- tige and authority of their own bloodline.